BRYN MAWR REVIEW OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

Reviewed by Bethany Schneider
Bryn Mawr College

Joel Pfister's Individuality Incorporated: Indians and the Multicultural
Modern is a history of both white US and Native American subjectivities
from the 1870s through the present. Pfister builds a brilliant argument
that traces both Native responses to, and white investments in, the
changing notion of the "individual." It is a book that takes
up one of the challenges facing literary and cultural studies approaches
to American Indian Studies today: building responsible and generative
comparatist models for studying the often violent, always contested
space of conflict and negotiation between Native and non-Native people
in the Americas.

Rather than attempting a broad, sweeping vision, Pfister drops several
plumb lines into the history of Native-white relations across the decades
that interest him. The first half of the book explores the notorious
school for Indian children in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, which operated
between 1879 and 1918. Here Pfister traces how, "Before pupils
from dozens of tribal cultures underwent attempts to transform them
into 'individuals' they were first lumped together as 'Indians,' a category
that defined them as deficient in the desires, character, ambitions,
and morality that constituted American 'individuality.' Put differently,
Carlisle first Indianized its diverse students so that their
individuality could be sanctioned -- the two ideological classifications
worked in unison" (20). The second half of the book turns to the
cultural and political manifestations of modernism in relationship to
"Indianness." Pfister explores the ideological attachment
of white modernists D.H. Lawrence, Mabel Dodge Luhan and Mary Austin
to the American Southwest, arguing that the artists' colony resignified
Indians as "therapeutic" to a beleaguered white "individualism."
Concomitant with modernism's insatiable appetite for the comforts of
savagery, Pfister shows how that very structure of desire resulted in
particularly devastating Federal policies aimed at getting Indians to
individualize through the commodification of their own culture. Pfister
elegantly teaches us to see these modernist erotics of the multicultural
as not so very different from the pedagogies of cultural destruction
practiced at Carlisle a generation or two earlier. Under Indian Commissioner
John Collier's "Indian New Deal," Natives were refigured as
the experimental subjects of a new vision of governmental control of
non-white Americans. It was a vision based in disturbing fantasies of
what a "multicultural" US might mean for Natives asked to
perform their own multiplicity of cultural belonging, and for identity-hungry
white Americans who wanted "individuality" to mean something
more "deep" and "spiritual."

The second half of the book clarifies "the historical significance
of the modernist protomulticulturalisms -- promoted by artists,
novelists, intellectuals, bohemians, community activists, tourism companies,
museums, schools, the Indian New Deal's Bureau of Indian Affairs. Discourses
of 'depth,' the 'primitive within,' anitipuritanism, cultural relativism,
and in some cases socialism contributed to, and were in turn shaped
by, the ideological formation of these modernist protomulticulturalisms.
Some of what modernist protomulticulturalists stood for may seem unambiguously
liberatory; but liberatory in what ways and for whom? As Native scholars
in particular warn, critiques of internal colonization too often turn
out to be new forms of that colonization" (141). Here, Pfister
shows us what is at stake in his study. By connecting the "bad
old days" of Carlisle to a modernism which may be acknowledged
to be slightly misguided but fundamentally well-intentioned, Pfister
is disallowing us the easy narrative that sees early twentieth-century
fascinations with "the primitive" as perhaps naïve, but
nevertheless a sign of the beginnings of the end of racism, a beginning,
such logic goes, that we are still participating in and working toward.
Instead, he draws powerful connections between a past that is acknowledged
to be regrettable, and a self-congratulatory sense of a present dedicated
to slow improvement: he disallows that handy rupture, and he does it
-- brilliantly -- through a trope that seems to belong to white America
but which he reveals as projected across the figure of the Indian. Individuality
Incorporated helps us understand the present and the ways in which
Indianness is eroticized by white Americans while Indians themselves
are structurally and culturally abandoned, by tracing the enduring investments,
across what might seem to be radical cultural change in white America,
in what "individuality" means, and in how Indians are asked
to perform it for a watching or even participating white audience.

In the book's introduction, Pfister reminds us that the idea of the
individual is an invention that insists upon seeming natural and eternal,
an invention and an amnesia to which Americans are firmly incited to
convert. But, as Pfister notes via Clifford Geertz, "The Western
conception of the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated
motivational and cognitive universe, a dynamic center of awareness,
emotion, judgment, and action organized into a distinctive whole and
against its social and natural background, is . . . a rather peculiar
idea within the context of the world's cultures" (15). Certainly
it is peculiar in the context of traditional Native American cultures,
as Pfister notes this time via Louis Owens (Choctaw and Cherokee): "The
privileging of the individual . . . is a more radical departure for
American Indian cultures than for the Western world as a whole, for
Foucault's 'moment of individualization' represents an experience forced
harshly, and rather unsuccessfully, upon Native Americans" (17).
Pfister argues that the forcing of individualization upon Native Americans
was, in fact, a repeated scene of experimentation and that its effects
have redounded upon both Natives and whites, albeit differently. More
than this, the book insists that we read the fact that Natives were
the experimental subjects of, negotiators with and resisters to the
project of inventing and reinventing the American "individual,"
as integral to any intellectual, political and cultural history
of US subjectivity. Pfister does not relegate Native voices to a static
subjecthood as uncritical reporters of tragedy or mysterious voices
from a lost or disrupted teleology. Rather, he consistently and insistently
employs and gives space to the critical, theoretical and interventative
positions of Native intellectuals, historians and artists such as Luther
Standing Bear, Charles Eastman, Black Elk, Zitkala Sa, Jimmie Durham,
Leslie Marmon Silko and many others. This approach produces a scholarly
conversation between and across a Native and a white archive and insists
upon an equal platform for comparatist work. Although such an approach
should be common, it is in fact all too rare.

Scholars interested in American Indian Studies have vast resources
upon which to rely. The field is built upon decades of historical, anthropological
and sociological research conducted by Native and non-Native scholars.
But in literary and cultural studies the scholarship has been somewhat
divided between work that focuses on Native cultures and cultural production,
and a parallel body of scholarship, relying upon its own archive, which
is engaged in intricate portraitures of the racist figure of the "Indian."
There has been a growing concern about the increasing mutual exclusivity
of these two approaches. Some scholars, like Craig Womack (Creek) in
Red on Red: Native American Literary Separatism, have argued
persuasively that an appropriate response to this divide is to understand
Native cultural productions as comprising national literatures different
from (not merely internal to or eccentric versions of) US cultural production.
This argument challenges scholars to see Native cultures as living and
generative and politically sovereign, and to give to Native nations
the same specificity of attention afforded to US literature and culture.
Other scholars, like Philip Deloria (Lakota) in Playing Indian,
have turned the model of scholarship that reiteratively explores the
image of the "Indian" inside out, and rather than focusing
on the various projections of racism onto Natives, focus on the structural
importance of the obsession with Indians to white self-understanding.

Pfister's work, without ever directly referencing either Deloria or
Womack's argument, represents an important bridging of the gap. This
is not a book that, yet again, rehearses the structures of white racism
without addressing Native responses and reactions. Here Pfister weaves
an intricate double helix, tracing the importance of the figure of the
"Indian" to the development in US culture of the idea and
ideology of individualism and to the increasing power of state and corporate
uses of "multiculturalism." In addition and in conversation
with that history, he explores the effects of the ideology of individualism
on Native Americans. He traces how Natives were incited more or less
forcibly to first perform the "Indian" who is not yet "individual,"
and then to perform the "individual" who emerges from the
rejected, killed, or sloughed-off "Indian." It is a double
portrait that, across its development, allows us to see the full potential
and searing importance of responsible comparatist work being done in
and around American Indian Studies.